Editor’s Note: Set against the backdrop of the 2025 AFL-CIO Martin Luther King Jr. Civil and Human Rights Conference in Austin, Texas, this essay intertwines history, personal experience, and sharp analysis to explore the critical connection between labor and civil rights movements. Reflecting on the unfinished tasks of Reconstruction, the author highlights the stakes of solidarity and the blind spots that still challenge the path forward.
You can read our prior coverage here.
Tourist chatter echoes off the walls of the capitol rotunda in Austin, Texas, as I pass the portraits of past governors. The chatter is a soft din, little more than white noise in the background—yet it hasn’t always been this way.
I was here in 2013 when Republicans used craven political maneuvers to shut down Wendy Davis’ filibuster of anti-abortion legislation. As the time remaining on the legislative session wound down, the tiny Democratic minority pulled every lever it could to slow what seemed inevitable. Just as all hope seemed lost, Democratic State Sen. Leticia Van de Putte rose to her feet in the chamber with a furious question: “At what point must a female Senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room?”
Her words were a spark. The crowd, crammed shoulder to shoulder on every floor, erupted like a bomb: cheering, chanting, screaming, crying. The roar shook us to our bones and carried itself over the deadline—a freight train of popular anger immune to the power of the state police trying to stop it. There was a lull when someone emerged from the second floor in the rotunda to deliver news of the law’s fate: it had failed to pass. Our roar had drowned out the last 15 minutes of the session, preventing the speaker from tallying an official vote.
What Wendy Davis started, we had finished. The filibuster was ours.
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Over a decade later, the AFL-CIO is hosting its national “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Civil and Human Rights Conference” just a few blocks away from that looming, rose-colored building. The event is itself historic; it marks the first national AFL-CIO conference in Austin’s first union hotel. In the aftermath of the recent election, there can be no doubt about the urgency of the conference’s theme of strengthening the unity of the labor and civil rights movements.
Texas AFL-CIO President Rick Levy took the stage on the first day of the conference, where he spoke on the importance of defending our history in the face of ever-sharpening rightwing attacks. One line in particular resonates. “If we don’t know where we come from, who we are connected with—today and throughout history—if we don’t know whose shoulders we stand on, they think we will fall.”
Our history is more than just dates and names; it is a love letter from our past to provide us with comfort and counsel through our own trials today. Working people have very little money, marginal political power, and no great media conglomerates or hedge funds. We only have each other, and the history of our labors and struggles binds us together across time and space.
Levy drives the point home: “Are we going to let ’em make us fall?”
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It is hard to imagine a historical example uniting the labor and civil rights movements more effectively than Reconstruction. President of the Chicago Teachers’ Union Stacy Davis Gates makes the case perfectly on the conference stage. Gates points out that what W.E.B. Du Bois called The General Strike of the Slaves “was the greatest, first labor action in this country that helped to foment the democracy that we live in now.”
The Americans who escaped those conditions of cruel bondage fled not to safety but into a dangerous freedom at the heart of the crucible of war. By the thousands, they took up arms and fortified what, for a moment, became a great people’s army.
“They joined for their democracy,” Gates says to the audience. “That is what labor is being called into in this moment.”
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My wandering stops in front of the portrait of an unsung but personal hero of mine: Radical Republican Gov. Edmund J. Davis. Davis fled Texas at the start of the Civil War to become an officer in the Union army. After the war, he led the Radical faction of the Republican Party to implement a revolutionary program of Reconstruction: equality, education, and democracy. When terrorist insurgent violence began to sweep the state, Davis formed the Texas State Police and filled it with armed freedmen.
This revolution could not be stomached by the forces of reaction in my home state. Through widespread fraud and brutal public terrorism, white supremacist Richard Coke claimed victory over Davis in the 1873 election. Davis rejected Coke’s victory, successfully challenging the election in court, which Coke in turn rejected.
Just a few miles from the conference, and nearly 151 years ago to the day, Reconstruction’s future culminated in an armed standoff on the very capitol grounds where I now stood.
Davis called out the Texas State Police for protection and order, barricading the entrances from the coup mob outside. When the mob scaled the walls to enter through the second-floor windows, Davis called out the Travis Rifles, supposedly personal security for the governor. This white organization promptly defected to Coke upon arrival.
Civilian freedmen, hearing the news, spontaneously descended on the capitol grounds, many armed, to march the building’s perimeter. Balanced on the edge of a knife, Governor Davis urgently requested President Grant deploy federal troops to uphold law and democracy.
Grant declined, and with that, Reconstruction was lost.
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Contemporary calls for a new Reconstruction can sometimes emphasize the fight for racial equality while neglecting its class dimensions. Demond Drummer, Director of Strategy for the Institute on Race, Power, and Political Economy, warned the conference attendees against the “evacuation of the economic content of the Civil Rights Movement from our memory of what Martin Luther King, Septima Clark, and all these other people were fighting for.”
It is impossible to imagine a Civil Rights Movement without leaders like A. Philip Randolph or Bayard Rustin, or without funding and training from unions like the United Auto Workers or the Amalgamated Meatcutters and Butchers Workmen, without a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
“It wasn’t just voting rights. It wasn’t just civil rights. It was economic rights,” Drummer says to the crowd. “And I think labor is well positioned to own that and reinject the economic vision of that Civil Rights Movement back into how we remember Martin Luther King Day, Black History Month, and all the things.”
Could such a project be anything other than a new Reconstruction?
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There was one painful blind spot of the conference that I would be remiss to neglect. One pillar of Dr. King’s legacy was totally absent: the struggle against militarism. The right to live in peace, a core democratic and human right, received no serious attention that I could see. I saw no Palestinian flags, no coordinated button action, no protests, not even any tabling.
This blind spot is a great danger to our unity. The “First Reconstruction” collapsed in large part because Northern industrialists preferred using Federal troops to conquer the West rather than enforce democratic and constitutional rights. The “Second Reconstruction” collapsed in part over Vietnam.
It is easy to love Dr. King today but easier to forget how hated and vilified he became when he came out against that criminal war. It wasn’t just “the right,” or the white supremacists, but even longtime allies who attacked Dr. King for his courageous stance against militarism.
The labor movement may have never been as internationally oriented as it is today. The National Labor Network for Ceasefire movement has gathered millions of workers under its banner and formal statements of support across unions big and small. I was proud when the Texas AFL-CIO was the first state federation to support a ceasefire.
Yet even if such a blind spot is incidental or unintentional, the consequences of neglect remain dangerously real. History shows that any unity of labor and civil rights that stops at the border will fracture before it can succeed. Without peace, there can be no Reconstruction.
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These conferences can often feel more a function of pageantry than power. At almost $300 a ticket, it’s safe to say the halls weren’t exactly overflowing with rank-and-file workers. Still, even when cynicism is the familiar response, I’m not convinced it’s the most useful one.
History—and the struggle that drives it—unfolds according to its own logic. Humans, through our labor, shape it, but we are never able to determine it completely. Whatever its limits and contradictions, the conference pointed clearly at the tasks at hand: building unity, practicing solidarity, and fighting together for real power.
These cannot be completed at a conference, even if it was bursting with the rank-and-file. It is only outside such a space, when working hands take up the tools of struggle in our daily lives, that we can unite the labor and civil rights movements. And only then can we finally finish the revolutionary tasks of Reconstruction.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article reflects the views of its author.
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